People pass by posters showing the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic mascots in Seoul, South Korea, on Jan. 17. North Korea plans to send a 230-member cheering squad to South Korea as part of its delegation to February’s Winter Olympics, the latest in a series of conciliatory gestures the North has abruptly taken recently following a year of heightened nuclear tension. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

In this Jan. 25 photo provided by South Korea Unification Ministry, South Korean hockey players, right, talk with North Korean hockey players, left, at South Korea’s national training center in Jincheon, South Korea. (South Korea Unification Ministry via AP)

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South Korean protesters stage a rally against North Korea’s nuclear program near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, on Jan. 9. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

North Korean defector Park Sang-hak holds up a defaced portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a press conference against North Korea’s participation in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Jan. 24. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

South Korean protesters burn a portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a rally against a visit of North Korean Hyon Song Wol, head of North Korea’s art troupe, in front of Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, on Jan. 22. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Right off the bat, Kristine Dennehy warned she wasn’t going to predict what North Korea might do with its nuclear weapons. She knew, after all, that’s what her audience was wondering.

Instead, said the chair of Cal State Fullerton’s history department, she wanted to show how North Korea got to where it is today – as a blustering nuclear power threatening its neighbors and the United States.

Kristine Dennehy, chair of the history department at Cal State Fullerton, spoke Jan. 23 at the Fullerton Public Library on the history of “A Divided Korea.” (Photo courtesy of Cal State Fullerton)

On the eve of an Olympics in which the two Koreas are supposed to march together under one flag, Dennehy presented a talk Jan. 23 at the Fullerton Public Library on “A Divided Korea.” She charted a course through the history of the Korean peninsula to show how Korea’s subservient relationship with Japan, and its resistance to that colonialism, gave rise to a self-reliance in North Korea that grew into the extreme state we see today.

“A lot of Americans say ‘North Korea is so crazy. Why would you ever live there? Why would you ever support somebody like Kim Il Sung or the Kim family dynasty? How can this be that Kim Il Sung has any legitimacy?’” Dennehy said. “It’s important to put in historical perspective his resistance to Japanese imperialism to understand the current situation.”

Nuclear weapons, she said, give North Korea a legitimacy and autonomy the nation lacked for most of its history.

Korea was a sort of protectorate of Japan starting in about 1905, with Japan trying to “civilize” the country with railroads, telegraphy and other rapid modernizations and taking over its police and military. Korea’s museums stress this as a period of national shame, with Koreans — in both the north and south — asking what went wrong that they weren’t strong enough to fight back.

Korea then was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945, with its people forced to speak Japanese until the dissolution of the Japanese empire at the end of World War II, explained Dennehy, who specializes in Japanese and Korean post-colonial history and lived in Japan for about five years and has spent time in South Korea.

It didn’t help that the United States and other world powers gave Japan a pat on the back for westernizing Korea, with President Teddy Roosevelt crowing over how Japan learned from us.

The Koreans didn’t take it lying down. They appealed to the international court in The Hague as well as to Western missionaries in Korea.

“This attention to Korean resistance is really important historically,” Dennehy said. Citizens of both countries celebrate March 1 as the anniversary of a declaration of Korean independence by activists in Seoul in 1919.

“With so many things that divide North and South Korea, March 1 is one thing that unites them in resisting Japanese imperialism,” she said.

And who was prominent in the resistance against the Japanese? Kim Il Sung, grandfather of North Korea’s current leader, who aligned with Chinese communists to fight the Japanese. A second activist, Syngman Rhee, became revered for protesting Japanese rule, some of the time in exile in the United States.

On V-J Day, Korea celebrated its liberation from Japanese rule, then was divided by the United States and the Soviet Union in a plan of expediency that wasn’t given a lot of attention at the time as the world’s eyes were turned to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremburg trials in Europe, Dennehy said. Most expected the division to be temporary.

The North didn’t take part in U.N.-monitored elections in South Korea, then elected the communist-aligned Kim Il Sung as leader in 1948.

The Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, in which the Soviet Union and China backed North Korea while the United States defended South Korea — intensified the division between the two nations.

After the war, Kim championed juche, an ideology of self-reliance, for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea. He espoused forging an independent path not just from Japan but also from communist China and the Soviet Union. The country became more industrialized than the more rural South, continuing to receive funding for its first nuclear reactor, for example, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 stanched that.

“It’s that long-term history going back centuries and centuries that informs the mindset of someone like Kim Il Sung in 1955 to advocate this ideology: `We should be self-reliant,’” Dennehy said. It’s how Kim established his legitimacy to the North Korean people. The concept took hold.

This is when things got a little complicated. After the war, many South Korean farmers were displaced from their land and moved to Japan. They were forced to take Japanese names and were at the bottom rung of the social order, unable to get education or jobs beyond working in the pachinko parlors. Like most people, they thought the division of the Korean peninsula was temporary and so established their own schools to educate their children to prepare to return to Korea.

As the years went by, these displaced South Koreans began to relate more with the utopian, communal philosophy of North Korea versus what they saw as the lackey relationship South Korea had with the United States. So in the late 1950s and early 1960s, about 90,000 ethnic Koreans repatriated to North Korea, often splitting up families in Japan.

That, however, is one answer to Westerners queries over how the now-impoverished North Korean state can afford its nuclear program, Dennehy said. Those Koreans in Japan are a revenue stream of foreign currency into North Korea’s coffers.

The fortunes of the two Koreas reversed in the 1980s as the South became an economic powerhouse and the North stagnated. By the mid-1990s, North Korea was experiencing deprivation and famine, referred to as the “arduous march,” under Kim Jong Il, who took over after the death of his father in 1994.

This notion, Dennehy said, was, “We’re struggling, we’re all in it together.” The new leader began staging mass athletic games as Adolf Hitler did.

South Korea, meanwhile, grew closer to the United States and began taking part in joint military exercises with the U.S. and Japan. This raised suspicions among the North Koreans, who equated American imperialism with Japanese imperialism.

Dennehy mentioned a video taken in North Korea in which the electricity goes out and someone is heard saying, “Damn Americans.”

“Where’s that coming from?” she asked. “It’s not just a legacy of the civil war – the tension between North and South. It’s also the North Korean people’s perspective on the kinds of alliances and joint military exercises between South Korea, Japan and the United States.”

By 1998, South Korea had moved into what’s called a “Sunshine Policy” toward North Korea, a more conciliatory stance marked by a promotion of tourism and joint industry. Many now credit that approach, which continued until about 2008, as naïve.

“A lot of people would say that the reason why North Korea has the nuclear capabilities that it does is because of a kind of naiveté on the part of the South Korean government during this decade: If they had taken more of harsher line, if they had imposed sanctions, then North Korea would not have been able to develop to its current state,” Dennehy said.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea first successfully detonated a nuclear device in 2006. Last year, under Kim Jong Un, the third generation in the Kim dynasty, the nation conducted its sixth nuclear test.

In response to questions from the library audience, which included some Korean War veterans, Dennehy said the recent agreement that the two Koreas will send a delegation to the Olympics in February in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and field a joint team in women’s ice hockey, is a positive development. It’s an iteration of the Ping-Pong diplomacy of the Nixon era, she said.

But North Korea has used its sports teams as political pawns before, she warned. “I don’t want to be naïve about what’s going on at the higher levels of diplomacy.”

In fact, on Jan. 29, North Korea notified the South it is canceling a joint cultural event it had planned for Feb. 4, blaming “insulting” South Korean news media coverage of its participation in the Winter Olympics.

Reporting on the interesting research and stimulating events at Cal State Fullerton is right up Wendy’s journalistic alley. A San Francisco native, Wendy earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford and a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley. After working in the news offices at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC San Francisco Medical Center, she became a business/technology reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal and served as business editor at the Daily Breeze before moving to copy editing and working for the Seattle Times. She joined the Register in 2003, where she was a team leader on the copy desk until early 2017. She teaches copy editing at Chapman University part-time, has two grown children and lives in downtown Anaheim, where she can walk to yoga and good coffee.